In a previous article in this series on the eugenics and class warfare agenda behind federally funded population programs like Title X and others, I detailed how minority leaders quickly became suspicious of the government’s push for “family planning.” This article will document the beginning of this agenda and how suspicions of these programs targeted at “low-income,” impoverished Americans continued.

In 1919, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger made an astonishing admission.Quoting from Sanger’s “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” published in the February 1919 edition of her Birth Control Review, Sanger says, “Birth Control will clear the way for eugenics and the elimination of the unfit.” She went on:

Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods….

Eugenics without Birth Control seems to us a house builded upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.

Sanger’s statement could almost be described as prophetic. Fears of the overpopulation of certain people groups were and are common in eugenics circles. By the 1960s, as discussed in part one of this series, fears of overpopulation were again being driven by organizations with ties to eugenics, pushing for federal dollars to reduce the births of the poor.

This was met with resistance in the United States, where there was a growing concern that the push for federally funded population control was motivated by a sinister plot to limit the births of Blacks and other minorities. After all, years of eugenic programs, had already been aimed at sterilizing Black Americans, so why wouldn’t federally funded “family planning” programs also target those populations?

Graffiti says Birth Control is a Plan to Kill Negro (Image credit: Jet Magazine, August 1951)

In Margaret Sanger’s “Plan for Peace,” published in the April 1932 edition of her Birth Control Review, the Planned Parenthood founder laid out her eugenic ideas for using government resources to reduce populations of those she deemed “unfit.” It reads in part:

…Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.

The main objects of the Population Congress would be:

a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population
b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand…

…The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends, classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.

Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense-defending the unborn against their own disabilities.

Margaret Sanger’s Plan for Peace (edited)

In 2017, data from the Centers for Disease Control showed that overall, the U.S. birth rate had reached the lowest recorded number of births in 30 years. According to a May 2018 article in Forbes:

… [A]s described… at the Institute for Family Studies, 2017 fertility rates have been published, and show a 40 year low at 1.76 lifetime births per woman, with the most dramatic declines expressed in “missing births” over the past decade, occurring among Hispanic and African-American women, whose fertility rates are now, while still higher, much closer to the already-low rates of white non-Hispanic women. Specifically, the fertility rate for black women dropped from 2.15 to 1.89, and that of Hispanic women dropped from 2.85 to 2.1 in the time period of 2008 – 2016, compared to a decline from 1.95 to 1.72 births per non-Hispanic woman.

Recently, an Urban Institute report which looked at the birth rates for women in their 20s, found that from 2007 to 2012, according to CNBC, “Hispanic women in the age group saw the biggest declines in birth rates—a 26 percent plunge. That was followed by a 14 percent decrease among African-American women and an 11 percent fall for white women.”

Data on users of Title X clinics by race/ethnicity reveal that poor minorities are growing in their usage of the so-called free “family planning” services. In 1991 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), reported the following:

Out of the 4 million family planning clients who Title X serves, more than half are women of color: 30 percent identify as either black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or American Indian or Alaska Native, and another 32 percent of clients identify as Hispanic or Latino.

21 percent of all Title X clients identify as black or African American, and 30 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino, while African American people and Hispanic and Latino people make up 13 percent and 17 percent of the U.S. population, respectively.

The figures show an alarming increase in users among the Black and Hispanic communities, specifically. This means that poor, minority women are likely more highly targeted for population control services through federally funded “family planning” programs than in the past.

In 1951, Dr. Charles V. Willie, Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University in New York, noted that Black Americans opposed any government effort to limit their numbers. Professor Willie studied the Black community’s attitudes on this topic and concluded that they viewed these efforts as Black genocide. “The genocidal charge of Black people is anchored in good data,” the professor told Jet Magazine. “Blacks point out that a leading government spokesperson has declared that an increase in Black people of 1 to 2 percent points of the total population is ‘extra-ordinary.’ Blacks also point out that whites were not concerned about their family form and size during the age of slavery.”

The Black Panther party considered contraception only one part of a larger government scheme of genocide. Drugs, venereal disease, prostitution, coercive sterilization bills, restrictive welfare legislation, inhuman living conditions, “police murders,” rat bites, malnutrition, lead poisoning, frequent fires and accidents in run-down houses, and black over-representation in Vietnam combat forces all contributed to the malicious plan to annihilate the black race.

Author Donald T. Critchlow, in his book, “Intended Consequences, Birth Control, Abortion and the Federal Government in Modern America,”also noted the opposition, writing, “The Black Muslim newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, kept up a steady attack on federal family planning programs as a white plot against the black community.”

By 1962, Urban League and NAACP chapters would join the list of “family planning” critics, according to Caron:

Whitney Young, leader of the Urban League, revoked his group’s support of contraception in 1962. Several local NAACP chapters followed suit. Marvin Davies, head of the Florida NAACP, rejected contraception and argued that black women needed to produce large numbers of babies until the black population comprised 30-35 percent of Americans; only then would blacks be able to affect the power structure.

In September of 1965, according to author David Allyn in his book, “Make Love, not War,” “the NAACP opposed a $91,000 federal grant for the dissemination of birth control information in North Philadelphia. The NAACP charged Planned Parenthood, which had applied for the grant, with attempting to ‘help Negroes commit racial suicide.’ ”

Many of these fears were confirmed when, in 1964, the platform of the American Eugenics Party included the following:

The United States is already over-populated. We must stop all immigration and impose birth controls.

Those genetic types within each race and stock having better traits will be encouraged to produce more offspring and those having the lesser qualities will be restricted in the number of their offspring.

But advocacy of “family planning” programs was strong and the push was coming from top leaders, including the President of the United States.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) lent his support to taxpayer funded “family planning” efforts within the U.S. and abroad, claiming in a speech that for every five dollars spent on population control, more than a hundred would be invested in economic growth. For implementation of an “affirmative and effective population policy at home and abroad,” President Johnson was bestowed Planned Parenthood’s highest award (the Margaret Sanger Award).

Lyndon B Johnson receives Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award

Planned Parenthood had its roots in eugenics; founder Margaret Sanger was a member of the American Eugenics Society, who stacked her board with leaders of the eugenics movement and even willingly spoke to members of the Ku Klux Klan. Simply changing the organization’s name from the American Birth Control League (under Sanger’s leadership) to Planned Parenthood did not erase Planned Parenthood’s eugenics ties. You can trace the organization’s deep ties in eugenics well beyond their name change in 1942, and that philosophy has been carried on throughout its history.

Guttmacher was also a eugenicist, joining others of his day in voicing a concern about rising population growth. Guttmacher did not discount the idea of coercion.

Compulsory Birth Control article

In 1966, Guttmacher compared the world population with the threat of nuclear war, telling the Washington Post that governments may have to act officially to limit families. “It may be taken out of the voluntary category,” Guttmacher said.

Guttmacher abortion coercion possible

Although Guttmacher can be credited as the mastermind behind the push for abortion at Planned Parenthood, he also helped craft the push for taxpayer funded family planning.

As Live Action News previously documented, in 1966, Guttmacher proposed a blueprint to force taxpayers to pay for birth control access for the poor. By this time, Guttmacher had become more crafty in his messaging, promoting the concept as empowering others to make “choices,” when the real motivation was population control. This eugenics agenda was clear in his statement published by the New York Times: “The main goal of our program is not just to limit population, but to give everyone the same opportunity for quality medical care.”

1963 article urges family planning for Blacks (Image credit New York Times)

The “plan” — described by a 1966 New York Times article as a “partnership of public and private agencies” — was to make birth control services “freely available to every American by 1970” in an effort to prevent about 250,000 pregnancies every year. It was presented at Planned Parenthood’s New York headquarters by the organization’s then-president, George N. Lindsay, who called it the “best bargain in health services that money could buy.”

Interestingly, a short time later, in 1967, according to HHS’ Administration for Children and Families website, funds for “family planning” were introduced:

The 1967 Social Security Amendments earmarked 6 percent of maternal and child health funds for family planning, officially sanctioning the Children’s Bureau’s involvement in these services for the first time. By 1968, nearly all States were providing some form of family planning through this program (up from 20 States just 4 years earlier), bringing assistance to more than 420,000 women.

In addition, the Maternity and Infant Care projects under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) supplemented the EOA [1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA)] effort by funding family planning services through city health departments. From fiscal 1967 to fiscal 1970, federal funds allocated to family planning increased to roughly $600 million (in 2010 dollars), over 10 times their level in 1967.

Author Donald T. Critchlow noted in the aforementioned book that by 1967, the “Children’s Bureau budget was increased to $50 million… but the bureau was hamstrung by restrictions that limited matching grants to state and local agencies. This policy deliberately excluded voluntary agencies such as Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds administered through state and local agencies.”

However, Critchlow also observed that by the time Lyndon B. Johnson left office in 1968, “a policy revolution in federal family planning had occurred, setting the stage for the further expansion of family planning programs under Richard Nixon.”

2016 GOP contender for President, Senator Marco Rubio defended his no exceptions position on abortion on Sunday’s Media Buzz on the Fox News station, but added that, if elected president, he would vote for any law that protects life, regardless of exceptions.

In the interview with the Senator, Media Buzz’s Howard Kurtz told Rubio that supporters of the Jeb Bush campaign may be looking into using Rubio’s no exceptions on abortion position against him. Kurtz pointed to a New York Times article detailing how the head of a political Super PAC, which has raised more than $100 million for Jeb Bush, may be behind the strategy.

According to the report, the PAC Right to Rise’s top strategist, Mike Murphy, has portrayed the young Senator from Florida as too extreme on abortion, because Rubio had “never advocated” laws that would allow abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. The paper claims that Murphy has privately said that Right to Rise stands ready to devote up to $20 million to oppose Rubio and will use his abortion position as part of that effort.

Rubio responded by telling Kurtz he is pro-life and believes all life should be protected, “First, I can save him $20 million by telling him that I am pro-life. Because I believe all human life is worthy of the protection of our laws.”

But, the Senator admitted that despite his purists views, he is willing to support any legislation which protects life, even it it has exceptions:

“As president, I will support and sign any legislation that saves lives, even if it has exceptions. I don’t personally require exceptions but if there’s a bill before me that saves lives by preventing abortions after twenty weeks or whatever it may be, I will sign it even if it has exceptions,” he said.

Rubio has not been secret about his position. In the first GOP presidential debate, the Senator was asked by Fox’s Megyn Kelly about a rape exception for abortion. His reply was as follows, “I have never said that and I have never advocated that. What I have advocated is that we pass law in this country that says all human life at every stage of it’s development is worthy of protection. As a matter of fact, I think that law already exists. It’s called the Constitution of the United States.”
“And, let me go further,” he added. “I believe that every single human being is entitled to the protection of our laws whether they can vote or not. Whether they can speak or not. Whether they can hire a lawyer or not. Whether they have a birth certificate or not.

“And, I think future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”

Those are powerful words for a US Senator and presidential contender and, they show just how far the pro-life community has come in educating society on the horrors of abortion and the humanity of the unborn in the womb. Today, the protection of all unborn children regardless of how they were conceived is gaining traction. Recently Live Action president, Lila Rose weighed in on abortion for cases of rape and incest asking Sean Hannity and his pro-abortion guest, “Why should a child who’s conceived in rape be given the death penalty for the crimes of his or her father?”

She continued, “I think we can do better for women who are victims of sexual abuse and trauma to say that abortion is somehow a pathway to healing. Abortion is not a pathway to healing; it’s another violent act.”

Now, a new movement is afoot as those targeted for the so-called abortion exceptions are speaking out. Live Action News recently spoke to a rape conceived advocate who pointed out that the criminal in these “hard cases” is the rapist and not the unborn child. Juda Myers said that her group, Choices4Life works tirelessly to educate society that children conceived in rape have done nothing wrong. “To condemn a human for the crime of another is not justice,” she said.

Rubio has called abortion bad for our society and has angered abortion advocates with his no exceptions rhetoric, “There is no compelling argument for why a woman’s right to choose trumps a child’s right to live,” he once stated.

Marco Rubio says the argument on abortion comes down to two rights in conflict of one another.

“There is no compelling argument for why a woman’s right to choose trumps a child’s right to live.”

“You are the voice of children who cannot speak for themselves…The truth is, I believe in all my heart that future generations will look back and at this area in American history and condemn us. They’ll look at what’s happened here since 1973 and they will characterize this nation as barbarians. At some point hopefully in our lifetimes – but- certainly at some point – people will look back at this practice and say how could that be possible? ”